D203 decides agains hosting Bill Ayers at NN

[gatormom]

District 203 decides against hosting Bill Ayers at Naperville North
Bob Smith
Daily Herald 3/30/2009

Faced with a firestorm of criticism, Naperville Unit District 203 leaders have canceled plans to have controversial author Bill Ayers speak to students at Naperville North High School.

Superintendent Alan Leis said Monday morning he had received more than 100 e-mails and numerous phone calls about Ayers' scheduled appearance and decided "it just wasn't appropriate. Any (educational) value here is completely lost."

"It is truly amazing the level of anger and emotion around this issue," he said.

Ayers, the co-founder of the anti-Vietnam war group the Weather Underground and currently a University of Illinois at Chicago education professor, was slated to speak April 8 to social studies students at Naperville North.

The Weather Underground was responsible for a series of bombings at public buildings during the 1960s and '70s. Ayers' notoriety had faded over the years, but his ties to President Barack Obama became an issue during the 2008 campaign and he was thrust back into the limelight.

Ayers was not scheduled to be paid to speak at the school.

Leis said he initially had spoken to other schools where Ayers had appeared and gotten very positive responses.

"I only focused on how fascinating it would be for students to talk to someone who had a role in the presidential campaign," he said.

Since then, though, he said he has done more research into Ayers' background and "it's very hard to figure out who this guy is," he said.

When criticism arose about Ayers' appearance at Naperville North, district leaders considered having him speak to students at a different venue.

But in an e-mail sent Monday to district parents, they said it became clear over the weekend that "this issue was not really about where Dr. Ayers was speaking, but that he was speaking at all. Each day, the level of emotion and outrage has seemed to increase, along with the number of e-mails and phone calls received."

The district e-mail said Ayers' scheduled appearance became a "lightning rod" both inside and outside the District 203 community and "it is clear that any value to our students would be lost in such a highly charged atmosphere and that any debate of issues or viewpoints would be overshadowed by media coverage and anger over the event itself."

The district began receiving complaints about the scheduled appearance almost immediately after the Daily Herald reported on the planned lecture early last week.

Ayers was invited to speak by Naperville North history teacher Kermit Eby, a former student of Ayers'. Only students in Eby's eighth-hour class and other students whose eighth-hour class related to Ayers' presentation were to be allowed to attend and even those students would have needed a signed parental permission slip.

District officials said they had planned to treat the lecture like an in-school field trip.

Eby also has come under fire for issuing the invitation and district officials came to his defense in their e-mail.

"What was most unfortunate was that a few directed their anger toward an outstanding high school and at a well-regarded, award-winning teacher who encourages students to think for themselves," the e-mail said.

Ayers still is slated to appear April 8 at Anderson's Bookshop in downtown Naperville, although officials at the store said they are not certain if they will proceed with the event.

• Daily Herald Staff Writer Elisabeth Mistretta contributed to this report.

www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=282733&src=2

[gatordog]

from Chicago Tribune
By its very controversy, Ayers' visit offered much
Eric Zorn | Change of Subject
March 31, 2009
Should officials have invited Vietnam-era radical Bill Ayers to speak to a student group at Naperville North High School next month?

Maybe not. At this point, Ayers is famous primarily for being a controversial figure in last year's presidential election.

Republicans tried loudly but without much success to highlight a minor association between Ayers and Barack Obama to suggest to voters that Obama was himself a radical with terrorist sympathies.

Prior to that, Ayers was well-known only among education experts who followed his work as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His words and deeds more than 35 years ago as co-founder of the Weather Underground were a fading memory, even though he'd published a provocative book on the subject in 2001.

So I can see administrators deciding against the idea. Since Ayers probably wouldn't have merited an invitation to speak at Naperville North a year ago, his appearance on campus now would amount to a celebrity stunt without enough educational value to be worth the inevitable community uproar.

But they went the other way. Supt. Alan Leis OKd the unpaid appearance for April 8 and publicly defended it as an opportunity for students to meet a genuine historical figure. Such an event "makes textbooks come alive," he told reporters.

And I can see that too. Ayers' story raises provocative questions about the limits of acceptable protest in a free society, the informal statute of limitations on serious youthful transgressions and the relationship between repentance and forgiveness. Listening to him and questioning him could be quite a learning experience.

To try to mute controversy, the school made the lecture optional and limited attendance to students enrolled in certain classes who had parental consent.

It didn't work. They got trouble right there in Riverwalk City. Every last inflamed allegation and accusation against Ayers that we remember from last fall resurfaced on local online bulletin boards. You'd have thought Naperville North had renamed itself in Ayers' honor, not merely invited him to make a presentation in an academic setting.

So the question on the table now is, Should officials have caved to community pressure, as they did Monday, and disinvited Ayers?

That answer is no.

Once administrators scheduled the event, for better or worse, they planted a flag on top of an important hill. That hill, which is always under attack, stands for the principle that we shouldn't be afraid to expose teenagers to difficult or even wrongheaded ideas, and that we should challenge them to think for themselves, not quake at the thought that they might.

In disinviting Ayers, they've allowed an angry mob to overrun that hill and rip down their flag.

"It is clear that any value [of the Ayers lecture] to our students would be lost in such a highly-charged atmosphere," wrote Leis in his surrender statement Monday. "Any debate of issues or viewpoints would be overshadowed by media coverage and anger over the event itself."

He's completely wrong.

The more highly charged the atmosphere, the more anger raging in the community that the old radical was allowed to speak, the more students would have learned. About courage. About the occasional discomforts of freedom. About the raw power of ideas.

And perhaps about how wrong Bill Ayers was to try to use the weapons of fear and intimidation to get his way.